Mark Almond Oxford

Tuesday, 15 November 2016

13th November was as unlucky
for stalwart backers of the foreign policy-line embodied by Hillary Clinton
just as 8th November was for her domestic supporters. In both Bulgaria and
Moldova, the voters rejected women candidates for president who had been openly
endorsed by Washington and Brussels. Despite this patronage and boosting by the Euro-Atlantic power-centres neither woman broke through the glass ceiling. Or was it both were seen as token females put up for the highest office by shadowy male oligarchs anxious to keep power in countries blighted by poverty and corruption?

Do Bulgaria or Moldova matter?

Having witnessed how small states with
tiny electorates but vital Electoral College votes dealt body- blows to Hillary
Clinton's hopes of winning the US Presidency, it would be short-sighted and
arrogant - as the Euro-Atlantic establishment has so often been - to dismiss
voters in small East European states as irrelevant.

Having presumed that Bulgaria
was irretrievably anchored in the Euro-Atlantic power-structure by its
accession to both NATO and the EU, the choice of an openly pro-Russian
candidate for president of the country is a wake-up call to Brussels and
Washington. Similarly, the Moldovan elite had seemed locked into an
"irreversible" course as its premier put it to integration - better
said subordination - to the Euro-Atlantic model. In both cases, the majority of
citizens thought different.

Until the implosion of the
neo-con regime-change foreign policy embodied by Hillary Clinton and her
attack-dog for Eastern Europe, Victoria Neuland, we could have been confident
that the heavy-hands of Washington and Brussels would have pressured both
Bulgaria and Moldova to reverse such results. Yet even cash inducements like
the IMF's sudden dole of US$36 million to the Moldovan regime just six days
before the poll could not buy enough support . Even more striking was the
Bulgarian public's rejection of the pro-EU candidate who had boasted about how
much EU aid to the poverty- stricken Balkan EU member was at stake. What
ordinary Bulgarians and Moldovans know, and what the Euro-Atlantic elites and
media never admit, is that EU funds have been a motor of the corruption
suffocating their economies. Precisely because of the easy pickings EU and IMF
cash provides to the ruling elites, they have no incentive to act in the
majority's interests. Real reforms are tough to enact and make the people
richer not the insiders in the political class.

Until Trump's election, the
USA and EU deployed their massive power and influence to making any vote
against their policy-options seem futile despite popular recognition of how
they had gutted the productive aspects of both the Bulgarian and the Moldovan
economies. Sunday's elections in both countries may be straws in the wind. They
are victories for the genuine people power of the ballot box, not the
street-based populism of crowds favoured by Washington and Brussels to impose
"people power" on the people. It is striking that the Bulgarian
premier, Borisov, who is often criticised as "authoritarian" by state
media in the EU like Deutsche Welle and the BBC as well as by Euronews,
immediately resigned. He drew the democratic consequence of the defeat of his own candidate, the lady speaker, Tsetska Tsatcheva. But the premier of Moldova, Filip, who has been boosted by Euronews
etc. as a model European, immediately said the popular vote against his candidate, the ex-World Bank official, Maia Sandu, would have no
effect on his policies!

Even so, the election of
advocates of better ties to Russia is a small geo-political earthquake in
states NATO and the EU saw as securely-controlled bases for launching
anti-Putin policies. No-one has died in these tremors in Bulgaria and Moldova.
But the fact that the upheaval has been peaceful through the ballot-box leaves
only violence as a viable way of reversing the will of the people. Both
Bulgaria in 1997 and Moldova in 2009 saw violent Putsches from the street
enthusiastically endorsed in Brussels and Washington as "People
Power". If the kind of Soros-sponsored protests Americans themselves are
now witnessing at home against Trump are switched on in the East European
dissident states the counter-explosion could destabilise the whole EU-NATO
project in the vast post-Communist region which had seemed willing to lick the
West's hand no matter how often the West had imposed destructive
poverty-promoting policies.

But now it would be unwise to
think that the East European dogs can be kicked with impunity. They could turn
vicious as the French say and bite back. A change of course in Washington could
re-earn the pro-American consensus squandered over the last twenty-five years
by the cynical Euro-Atlantic consensus. But can Western elites swallow their
pride and learn the lesson of popular alienation. Or will they sink into denial
and double-down on the policies which have rendered them despised by ordinary
folk who see through phony rhetoric about swallowing touch economic medicine
for their own good. East Europeans know that playing the reform politician not
the entrepreneur is the way to get rich in their societies. Sadly, a lot of
people in the West are coming to a similar conclusion.

So the Trump Effect has
emboldened the ordinary voters of Eastern Europe to demand that their elite put
the people first. Maybe the Donald didn't mean that to be the outflow of his
victory in the USA, but that's how people there see it. If the rigid and
impoverishing policies promoted by the US-EU consensus cannot be revised, then
more results like those in Bulgaria and Moldova can be expected.

What should worry the US-EU
establishment is that elections are coming in countries which won't be so easy
to ignore as small East European states. Next spring, the Dutch and the French
vote. The anti-establishment tide in those two important EU and NATO states is
running strongly. Years of rhetoric about reform and anti-corruption strategies
across the New Europe of the old Soviet bloc coincided with rampant
influence-peddling and bribe-taking.

"Drain the Swamp!"
was one of Trump's most effective slogans. Across Europe, it echoes powerfully
precisely because of the hypocrisy and cynicism of domestic and Brussels-based
elites who talked so loudly about their commitment to the right kind of
anti-corruption strategies but, as East Europeans say, have their left hand
cupped behind their backs.

Tuesday, 8 November 2016

The sudden resignation of Mikhail Saakashvili as Governor of Odessa
and his accompanying tirade of accusations of corruption and treason against
the Ukrainian President, Petro Poroshenko and his coterie in Kiev came as a
bombshell for the Western media on 7th November. But it was a
strangely bland bombshell.

Yes, the voices of the West - the BBC, CNN, Wall St.
Journal, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty – mentioned that the former Georgian
President, who had been brought in to combat corruption in Ukraine’s key port
and one of its major Russian-speaking cities, had resigned, even that he
criticised his patron and old university chum, Poroshenko, for being on the
take. But the reportage has been strangely opaque.

Remember both Saakashvili and Poroshenko had been routinely
characterised as the epitome of anti-corruption campaigners by Western neo-con
voices whose echo-chamber is the supposedly liberal media, CNN, NBC in the USA
and BBC and Channel Four News in the UK. No mention of Poroshenko’s past
service to the “notoriously corrupt” regimes in Ukraine before 2014 is
permitted, nor reference to his alleged business dealings with pariahs like
Iran before he came on board for the regime-change of the decade in February,
2014. As for the reality that to most Georgians their ex-president, President,
Mikheil Saakashvili, was the
personification of a brutal, loud-mouthed demagogue that too was passed over in
silence by those who boast that “they tell truth to power” from the editorial
suites of Western newsrooms and newspapers.

Saakashvili’s own
people remember how it was exactly nine years ago on 7th November,
2007, that his Western equipped para-military police smashed demonstrations
against him in Tbilisi with a mixture of high-tech ultra-low frequency
disorientation weapons and good old-fashioned swagger sticks and jackboots. The anniversary of
Lenin’s seizure of power ninety-nine years ago has strange fascination for
Saakashvili as his day for decisive coups.

After his fall from power in Georgia four years ago,
Saakashvili had become a kind of post-Communist Flying Dutchman albeit
inverted. Abandoned by his Dutch wife after revelations of the crudest kind of
tax-payer-funded infidelities on the Georgian presidential jet, he roamed the West trying to find sanctuary.
Even the USA quietly but firmly denied him a haven as revelations that
underneath his glass-fronted police stations – much-vaunted in the Guardian and
Transitions online as model reforms - secret dungeons housed torture and sexual
abuse against his opponents have shattered his reputation at home and were known
to insiders abroad.

Saakashvili has of course embarrassed his US sponsors before
by launching unilateral action without consulting them and getting full
permission in advance. Remember how in August, 2008, he thought he could
overrun South Ossetia before Russia could react and would earn the plaudits of
the neo-cons in the West for his “courageous leadership”. Instead, he provoked
a Russian backlash and the disintegration of his army. In a grand strategy
worthy of Mussolini’s placement of his best troops in Ethiopia before invading
Greece and Libya with badly equipped conscripts, Saakashvili had sent his 6,000
US-trained troops to do garrison duty in Iraq for his American sponsors when he
decided to provoke Russia in 2008.

The worthless adventure shattered Saakashvili’s value to the
West less than a year after it had ignored his brutal suppression of opposition
and had endorsed yet another rigged presidential election in his favour.

Ousted by even some of his ex-cronies after 2012, it was his
old university contemporary, Petro Poroshenko, who threw a lifeline to the
ex-Georgian President and a slew of his ex-enforcers from Georgia. Rather as
the old Soviet Communist Party had deployed loyal apparatchiks from outside
each republic to enforce the Kremlin’s will on the multi-ethnic population of
the USSR, so Washington now backed a strategy of parachuting outsiders from
other ex-Soviet republics and of course the children of Nazi-era emigres from
Ukraine itself into key positions to control the Ukrainian people themselves in
case they took it into their heads to take democracy seriously.

The Americans often overlooked the internal contradictions
of this parody of Comintern tactics. Saakashvili was notoriously anti-Armenian
in power in Georgia, when he bulldozed scores of ancient Armenian buildings in
Tbilisi to make way for his Reichstag-look-alike presidential palace. So it
wasn’t by chance that he got into a brawl with the ethnic Armenian interior
minister of “independent” Ukraine last year.

Saakashvili’s arrival in largely-Russian-speaking Odesa was
a red rag to the locals. They resisted his attempt to massage local elections
in favour of his preferred candidates for mayor and so on as he had done back
home in Georgia. He denounced the opposition as corrupt but at best this was
the pot calling the kettle black. Saakashvili’s own tarnished reputation went
before him across the Black Sea even if seminars in Oxford or Harvard took his
credentials as “Mr Clean” at face value.

Now his wrestling match with the Ukrainian mafia and his
attempt to impose his own Georgian clan in Odessa has come into the open.

The publication of the Panama Papers was supposed to tarnish
Vladimir Putin but in reality the dirt spewed out of Poroshenko for his murky
Caribbean cash pile. Just as the revelation of David Cameron’s family ties to
offshore accounts fatally undermined his standing in the run-up to the Brexit
referendum. Poroshenko’s claims to represent Westernization for Ukraine were
not without an ironic plausibility.

Then to compound Poroshenko’s credibility gap as an
anti-corruption campaigner, an MP of Soros-sponsored Afghan Communist
background got a bill passed with American backing requiring politicians and
officials to publish declarations of their wealth. The published amounts
commonly enraged ordinary, poverty-stricken Ukrainians even if they were often
a shadow of the real wealth stashed away by the representatives of the people.

Having come to power by decrying Viktor Yanukovich’s alleged
“orgy of corruption”, the Poroshenko crew looked odiously bloated with
inexplicable wealth.

Into the scandal stepped the unpopular, alien governor
Odessa. Despite being appointed by the President, Saakashvili chose to denounce
him personally for betraying the Ukrainian people, Western values and the
anti-mafia crusade which Saakashvili claimed to personify.

Western media express surprise at the ferocity of
Saakashvili’s attacks on the integrity of his old university friend,
Poroshenko, who had rescued him from exile and given him his new lease of
political life in Odessa. Don’t these hacks remember how Saakashvili had been
raised up by Georgia’s Eduard Shevardnadze, who became godfather to his
protégé’s son, Eduard, while he was Minister of [In]Justice in that cruelly
corrupt regime, before Saakashvili turned on his patron and ousted him in the
so-called “Rose Revolution” in November, 2003? Now thirteen unlucky years
later, Saakashvili has bitten the hand that fed him in Ukraine.

Part of the Western media’s amnesia is of course that until
yesterday both Saakashvili and Poroshenko were portrayed as model reformers,
anti-corruption campaigners and so on. Suddenly, one paragon of civic virtue
smears the other. CNN, BBC and Wall St. Journal can’t compute it. Clearly,
no-one in the Central Information Agency had distributed the script in advance
of this crisis – so unlike the well-signalled abandonment of a Western darling
like Shevardnadze in 2003 or the preparations for the Maidan uprising in
2013-14. Then of course, the Amanpours et al. were on hand with the moniker and
mood music to encapsulate the propaganda line. Yesterday’s hero was now a
villain but forget about Shevardnadze or Kuchma, here comes an English-speaking
motor-mouth spewing out all the New World Order guff about civil society,
anti-corruption and, of course, Russophobia.

The Saakashvili-Porodshenko spat not only casts a garish
light on the sleazy reality of Western-backed regime change on either side of
the Black Sea – Georgia as well as Ukraine – but more importantly it illustrates
the dangerous tailspin into which the casual promotion of corrupt and unstable
post-Soviet politicians as paragons of civic virtue has plunged Western policy
in Eastern Europe. The recent uptick in sabre-rattling by NATO reflects the
bankruptcy of the political options promoted by the Euro-Atlantic
regime-changers. Having toppled and re-toppled post-Communist regimes,
promoting and then pulling down successive corrupt and brutal “heroes of the
street”, the West now faces the grim reality that its reputation is as
tarnished by this sleazy process as much as its former local heroes.

Maybe one of the youthful Najibullahs of Kiev will be pushed
to fill the void. But don’t underrate the ability of Ukraine’s oligarchs to
navigate the storms of post-Communist politics and never ending flow of
embarrassing revelations of hypocrisy and corruption which the Dnieper can
never wash away. Saakashvili has declared war in a most Hobbesian environment
on the most powerful and odious characters in the country. Above all, he has
denigrated the President of Ukraine himself whose authority cannot survive
allowing his former protégé to abuse him with impunity.

This cannot end well for both men. No-one should be
surprised if Saakashvili and Poroshenko are suddenly reconciled, but any
embrace of these two old comrades from the Komsomol can only follow Lenin’s
dictum: put your arms around the enemy’s shoulders so you get your hands closer
to his throat. Saakashvili may be counting on the Americans to save his bacon.
He seems to have forgotten what President Sarkozy told him in August, 2008:
“The Seventh Cavalry is not coming over the hill to rescue you.” Ultimately,
even the global nation par excellence does not believe that a Georgian
political clan can takeover Ukraine and rule it for Washington against the will
of the Ukraine’s own mafias.

Saakashvili’s impulsive detonation of this crisis might lead
other Ukrainians to pose as champions of probity against Poroshenko, but the
West’s international brigade of reformers who failed at home sent in to
transform Ukraine have had their day. Some slink back home to the Baltic States
or Chicago, but Saakashvili has no homeland anymore.

With his Georgian citizenship revoked, and Tbilisi demanding
his extradition for a host of alleged crimes in office from 2003 until 2012,
Saakashvili has few places to run to. Remember the USA wouldn’t give him
permanent residence which was why he jumped at the chance to serve Poroshenko’s
bogus anti-corruption but very real anti-Russian drive in Odessa. With the
boss-of-bosses’ backing in Kiev, Saakashvili could find himself facing
extradition back to Georgia – or even to Russia which accused him of genocide
for killing so many civilians in his madcap invasion of South Ossetia in
August, 2008.

The West can afford to throw away Saakashvili. Poroshenko
and his prime minister, Groysman – godson of Poroshenko’s father – have been
Washington’s key allies in Kiev. If they were to fall, or, if fearing
Washington was about to push them, they jumped ship back to their old comrades
in Moscow, the neo-cons’ house of cards in Eastern Europe could collapse.

Maybe the strange silence of the West’s normally vocal media
analysts about Saakashvili’s bombshell reflects their bewilderment that the
best-laid plans for domination in the East are beginning to crumble like one of
the stale cookies handed out in Kiev by that pin-up for regime-change, Victoria
Neuland. After all the hullaballoo about Donald Trump being the cat’s paw of
pro-Russian interests who had backed Viktor Yanukovich in the swirling crisis
in Ukraine three years ago, that none of
the hacks decrying his “hidden Kremlin links” have explained how Saaki and
Porky Poroshenko fell out so spectacularly or what it means for Western grand
strategy. Their silence is very revealing. Even Google’s Orwellian approach to
news-management has rarely been so crude: the story was a bombshell, headlined
with “live updates” – but not anymore.

Amnesia not analysis is increasingly the Western
media elite’s response to the crisis besettin its most cherished policies. Does
this silence imply retreat or will the West lash out after Tuesday’s US
Presidential election? Maybe Saakashvili’s tantrum will set the Seventh Cavalry
in motion, not to rescue him today any more than in 2008, but to mask the
failure of regime-change with open war in the East. Now that is something
the Western media has been talking about a lot recently.

Sunday, 17 July 2016

Some of the worst violence in Turkey’s failed coup against
President Erdogan came around his presidential palace. That location is the
natural focus of a coup, but what is very unnatural is the sheer scale of the
recently finished Palace in Ankara.

Erdogan’s seat of government is not a modest town house like
10 Downing St. Even the French President’s Elysée and Barack Obama’s White
House are housed and officered in modest surroundings by comparison. Thirty
times the size of the White House, all seats of government of Turkey’s NATO
allies could be contained inside its vast marble halls and endless corridors.

Being born into a poor but pious family from Turkey’s remote
north-east in 1954 who had moved to one of Istanbul’s sprawling poor
neighbourhoods, Recep Tayip Erdogan’s rise to the top ought to be a classic
heart-warming log cabin to White House story. But his taste in
mega-architecture reflects a personality that has more in common with the most
grandiose of Ottoman Sultans or more recent tyrants.

The high-handed way in which Erdogan overrode normal
environmental rules and budgetary procedures to push through his gigantic
living memorial is typical of his style and why his critics call him an elected
dictator.

It is Erdogan’s combination of genuine popularity with
authoritarian disdain for dissent that marks him out from the dictators with
whom he is compared. Another orphan-grandchild of the Ottoman Empire, Romania’s
Nicolae Ceausescu is often seen as the unconscious role model for Erdogan.
Ceausescu obliterated much of old Bucharest to build his Palace of the People
before his fall in 1989. That vast building is seen a model for Erdogan’s
palace in its mixture of ill-conceived styles and mega-scale. Both men were
born into poverty and rose to the top and then plonked their monuments down on
their people.

Romanians joked about the corruption in the Ceausescu family
who lived at the expense of the people saying they had achieved Communism but
only in one family. Turks have been known to note ruefully that Erdogan’s
relatives have done well out of an ostensibly good Muslim government which has
given them Islam in one family. But there the comparison with the Communist
dictator fades.

When Ceausescu faced a crisis in 1989 it was because the
people backed the army in toppling him. Yesterday thousands of Turks rushed
into the streets to back Erdogan against the military mutiny. Corruption
allegations even with evidence have bounced off him. Pictures of the
bank-teller’s cash-counting machine found in his son’s home along with
shoe-boxes of dollars and euros in 2014 ought to have shattered the President’s
Teflon image but didn’t. It was the investigators who got it in the neck. Populist,
Erdogan may be, but such popularity is a
political asset of phenomenal effect. However, the combination of an apparently
miraculous rise from the bottom of society to the top of politics with a credulous
majority share of population who mix Muslim piety with political naivety is a
dangerous brew.

Self-made as Erdogan is, his rise did not take place in a
vacuum. Decades of state-promoted secularism in largely Muslim Turkey had begun
to erode before he entered politics. In fact, it was the emergence of
organisations like Fethulah Gülen’s Hizmet
or “Service” movement thirty years
ago which paved the way for self-consciously Muslim politicians to gain a
popular base in Turkey. Although in 1996-97, Turkey briefly had an Islamic
prime minister, Erbakan, whose Welfare Party backed Erdogan for his first big
political role as mayor of Istanbul, the Army intervened behind the scenes to force
Erbakan to resign and Erdogan was banned from politics for 5 years for reciting
a poem comparing minarets to bayonets of an Islamic Turkey.

Although Gülen went into self-imposed exile in America
shortly after this so-called “post-modern” coup, his movement continued to
expand in Turkey and its members were key players in the promotion of Erdogan’s newly-founded Justice and
Development Party (AKP) as a Western-style centre-right party on the German or Dutch
Christian Democrat model.

Critics of Erdogan used to say he was a product of Gülen’s
movement and that without the Pennsylvania-based preacher’s network of
influence Erdogan would never have risen to the top. Well that maybe, but
Erdogan has long since detached himself from Gülen and has been gobbling up his
erstwhile patron’s network for years. It has turned out that the sorcerer’s apprentice
has much more appeal on the streets than the reclusive cleric.

Erdogan’s hypnotic
appeal to so many Turkish recalls the most sinister of precedents.

People may say that no Communist ever got elected but Hitler
came to power democratically. That’s true but Hitler never risked letting Germans
vote him out of office. Since 2002 Erdogan has trounced his rivals in election
after election.

Yesterday, President Erdogan repeatedly emphasised that he
had been elected by the majority of ordinary Turks. It is his trump card.
Liberals and secular Turks might scorn his self-made man’s mega-ego and vulgar
buildings, but these criticisms wash over 50% of Turks. Erdogan’s bullhorn voice and harsh rhetoric
are seen by many of them as the ordinary guy shutting up the posh
Western-educated elites who sneer at a president who can’t speak English.

Rather as the 48% of Remainers here were baffled and
outraged by northerners and Brummies voting Leave, in Turkey the big liberal
minority is very snobbish towards the bigger provincial majority who back
Erdogan.

Growing up with the ambition to be a soccer professional
rather than a Harvard PhD, Erdogan’s outlook on life chimes with the mentality
of Turkey’s chavs. His strong religious views are as much a rejection of the
secular elite which had run Turkey since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in
1923 as piety.

Erdogan came to fame when he won the mayoralty of Istanbul
twenty years ago – and then lost it for reciting an Islamic poem saying the
city’s minarets would be bayonets of the Turkey which he envisaged. Then the
secularists were strong enough to slap him down. But not for long.

Mixing appeals to the Muslim majority to use their votes
with sensible economic policies, Erdogan reinvented himself as a kind of
Turkish Muslim version of German-style
Christian Democracy. But his critics
always liked to cite his comment to Jordan’s King Abdullah that he viewed
democracy like a bus ride – you get off at your destination and don’t stay on
board to go round again.

So long as the economy grew so did Erdogan’s popular appeal.
He could trim back the influence of the military and bump up the Islamic
aspects of society. The fact that he was elected to the Turkish Parliament for
a Kurdish-dominated district in 2003 when his suspension from politics for
making illicit Islamist statements in still secular Turkey came to an end, was
taken as a sign that he could represent the alienated minority in the
south-east. The West saw him as a model
for Arab states undergoing revolution in 2011. He could offer Arabs an example
of how religious politicians could integrate people into a modern economically-prosperous
democracy after decades of military dictatorship.

But it is precisely Erdogan’s response to the Arab Spring
which brought out his capricious attitude to friends and partners. Hardly had
he accepted Colonel Gadaffi’s Prize for Human Rights in 2010 than he sent aid
to the rebels against the Libyan dictator. Bashar al-Assad and family were
holiday companions. Then in 2011 Erdogan denounced his Syrian neighbour as a
blood-soaked tyrant.

So far so good, if Erdogan had been a model of respect for
minorities and dissenters at home. But his switch from dialogue to all-out war
against the Kurdish minority in south-eastern Turkey was a symptom of his most
worrying personality traits: caprice ad cynicism. Sending in the Army and
Airforce to crush the Kurds in the Assad-way was a way of keeping Turkey’s
nationalists in uniform on side. If Turkey’s generals have been traditionally
secular and suspicious of an Islamic politician they are much more ferociously
nationalistic and hostile to Turkey’s minorities. By blaming the new conflict
on the Kurds Erdogan rallied voters and steel helmets to his side.

A similar dirty game has gone on with his switch from
backing the jihadi rebels against Assad to his new backing of the US-led war on
IS. Having let Islamist jihadi radicals pour across the border with Syria as if
it was a sieve, Erdogan suddenly declared himself the defender of moderate
Islam against extremist terrorists. They have hit back inside Turkey, so now
the country needs a strong man to defend it.

Like many authoritarians,
Erdogan is man of violent mood-swings. His affection can sour overnight
and just as quickly he can warm to
someone he bad-mouthed yesterday. For instance, in the run up to the coup he
was courting Israel’s Netanyahu whom he denounced as a child-killer during the
Gaza war in 2010. Vladimir Putin was as suddenly back in favour as Russia had
been Enemy No1 in 2015. The pilot of the Turkish fighter which shot the Russian
plane down on the Syrian border nine months ago has duly been detained as a
coup-plotter. The day before the coup, even Syria’s Assad was referred to in
emollient terms by Erdogan’s prime minister.

Mercurial in politics and ruthless in personality, the
extraordinary rise of Turkey’s genuinely popular authoritarian president is a
fascinating story but also an unsettling one. Democracy is supposed to produce
bland but reliable leaders. They accept their own people’s will and act as
trustworthy partners with allies. Erdogan’s changeability at home and abroad as
well as his imperious personality make me doubt that when his winning streak
falters he will stand in front of his palace happily telling the media that he
looks forward to spending more time with his family. After all his family and
friends are beneficiaries of his political clout. If and when Erdogan falls,
they will be the fall-guys for his regime’s many faults.

To register your interest in pre-ordering Mark Almond’s “Secular
Turkey: A Short History” go to criox.editor@aol.com

Thursday, 30 June 2016

Bad losers are very un-British, or used to be at any rate. Fair
play used to be the essence of Britishness. But die-hard Remainers loath it
like every other British tradition.

The hysterical reactions of local Liberal Democrats in
Oxford to their defeat a week ago brings Peter Pulzer’s famous definition of Fascism to mind: “Fascism is when the wets turn nasty”. Neither liberal nor
democrat, the hegemonists of North London and my own North Oxford are
turning into Euro-fanatics whose contempt for democracy is becoming openly Fascist.

The cult of youth, the contempt for the elderly and the preference for direct
action – albeit taken by others – over the ballot box are all too Fascistic for comfort. The hunt is on even for our own Matteotti. The Telegraph’s Catherine Gee posed a hardly
rhetorical question whether her reader’s would have killed Hitler or Stalin in
their cradles and wouldn’t do “the same” to Nigel Farage? On the Sunday after
the referendum I sat behind a BBC TV journalist screeching, “God, I want to
smash Vote Leavers in the face”! She could hardly control her venom against
“that foetus” Gove. One Europhile Oxford historian of the First World War was so
shell-shocked by the result that he has been effing and blinding on Twitter all week about Oxford graduate “Outers” calling them “W*nkers” or worse for not voting like him!

All of this hate-speech has let the virus of a post-modern
anti-democratic mentalityout into our society. Deploring on the one hand the intolerance of anti-migrant views allegedly underpinnng Brexit voters' choice, before decrying the need to heed their votes, at best the embittered Remainers call for a re-run and at worse pour personalised threats out into the internet against Leavers. PC Plod and ex-prime minister
David Cameron are all agog about graffiti on a Polish centre in London. But the
Thought Police ignore high-profile incitements to violence like the ones from public personalities which I have quoted.

Although I have lived surrounded by euro-conformists in leafy
North Oxford, this kind of frenzied rejection of the referendum result took me
by surprise. I should have known better, after all the first seminar paper I
gave in Oxford was about “Fascism as the Revolution of Youth”. But none of us like to think it could happen here.

Symptoms of the local totalitarian mentality were immediately apparent last Thursday on the path to
my local polling station in Polstead Road which was festooned with Remain
posters and it even had a Remain banner in its front-window! The house next
door was the local Remain HQ and plastered with posters. Several
neighbouring Remainers coming to vote could not see anything wrong with a
polling station advertising only one option. Leavers often expressed a naive faith in British fair-play when the subject of possible fraud in the voting or more precisely the counting was raised. This is England, they boasted! That sort of thing only happens in Ukraine! However, for Oxford’s blinkered Remainers, who provide the election-organising and vote-counting class, it was striking that blatant bias and illegal campaigning at the polling site was given a pass when done by the right side. After all, everyone around here is Remain as one put it to me. The referendum was a festival of unanimity North Korea-style.

As I wandered around the city on Oxford
University’s Open Day today for potential undergraduates, I lost count of the times a
scholar or stooge undergraduate was holding forth about what was wrong with the
Leavers or “reassured” would-be students that the university as a Remain
stronghold – which from its Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor downwards it is. No
debate in this home of lost causes is taking place – or permitted.The forlorn Euro-flags fluttering from the windows of colleges whose student inhabitants decamped to Glasto without bothering to vote give the city the air of a Danzig or Nuremberg at the moment they fell to the Allies in 1945 when the swastikas were still draped over balconies. Once Oxford was romantically Jacobite, now it is the Bunker of referendum denialism.

One North Oxford grande dame was furious when her two
veteran cleaners admitted to voting Leave. Poles are likely to replace them.
East European competition has made it possible even for dons to afford servants
for the first time since the Great War. Fine for them but economic
self-interest not racism makes the native servant class less enthusiastic about
falling wages.

In their frenzy of rejection, the Remainers are upside-down
and back-to-front. The very same liberal voices which decried “racism” in Leave
propaganda are now threatening us with – to coin a term – a “swarm of migrants”
from northern France once Brexit is enacted. Others decry how elderly
risk-takers have stolen the future of the UK’s cautious, conformist
conservative youth represented by the stars of Glastonbury bleating about
whether they’d need visas to go to Ibiza.

But it is the threats of violence against Leavers which
should be attracting attention. After the horror of Jo Cox’s murder, the BBC as
well as much of the liberal media was filled with pious calls for a
non-polemical approach to campaigning. The no-holds-barred bile directed by so
much anti-social media at Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage since was soon getting out of hand.

Bojo baiting was everywhere. Even the country house opera
set can’t avoid it. At Grange Park Opera
on Sunday, its director, Wafsi (a household first-name, like Boris, at least in
her own troupe) came on stage to denounce Boris. When some audience member
demurred, instead of shutting up Wafsi decided she who pays the piper calls the
tune and turned to her orchestra to ask them if they hated Boris. A few
moon-faced violinists began to bleat two legs good, four legs bad, but other
players sat stony-faced. Imagine if a Leave employer had asked employees to
join the chorus of Out and Proud!

If you thought the referendum result was a classic example
of Britain’s ability to make a revolutionary change without bloodshed, don’t
think the Remain camp are going to grin and bear defeat. 1945 or 1979 were
models of radical change through the ballot-box. 2016 should be another triumph
for our way of making big decisions but the liberal elite is in denial of their
defeat just as the new Fascists were after the First World War. Remember the Mussolini’s, Lavals and our own
Sir Oswald Mosley – fan of a united Europe to his dying day – were all renegade
lefties eighty years ago.

Hampstead harpies and North Oxford feminists are in the
forefront of the hate campaigns against Leavers. Their over-emotional response
to the Out vote and hysterical calls for violence against the majority who
frustrated their choice recalls the mentality of the fanatic women sitting
knitting at the foot of the guillotine during the French Revolution. To most of
us, they are about as seductive as Madame Defarge’s knitting-needles, but
having seen one killing during the referendum campaign, let’s not discount the
drip-drip effect of hate-media on impressionable or unstable young people.

France's polarised atmosphere in the 1790s produced its Charlotte Cordays as well as its real life Defarges.

Is the Britain now somewhere between the meeting of the Estates-General and the Terror, on the brink of the abyss? Or is our country entering the festering decay of constitutional authority as happened in Italy and much of Europe after 1918? The rhetoric of the referendum deniers sounds more Fascistic. It has none of the libertarian, egalitarian or fraternal tinge of the French revolutionaries'. Instead it is overflowing with bile against the poor, the chavs, anyone who outvoted the liberal elite.

With
a Tory leadership election scheduled to last until September and the Blairite veterans
of his bloody Iraq war bent on decapitating Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the
Labour Party, the post-Fascist frenzy to suppress anything passing for the
popular will has many opportunities to burst the banks of peaceful politics.

Wouldn’t it be a bloody irony, if a consequence of the
British people voting to recover their traditional way of life was marred by
the introduction of European-style political assassination? Our embittered
Euro-Fascists’ bark may be worse than their bite. But who can rule out the risk
of impressionable and unstable youths turning violent under the influence of
anti-social media having a go at Bojo or beating up elderly people as Out
voters? One thing is certain: no-one in
the broadcast media or the ancient universities is doing anything to calm the
situation. But, remember, the Liberal establishment colluded with the Fascists in Italy and elsewhere ninety-five years ago, too.

Sunday, 25 October 2015

[A version of this article appeared in The Mail on Sunday (25th October, 2015):
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3288189/Damn-Tony-Blair-Iraq-ISIS-Fear-abroad-home-sins-hugely-respected-writer-issues-simple-devastating-verdict-former-PM.html ]

Sorry never was the hardest word for Tony Blair – at least
before Iraq.

For twelve years until his carefully choreographed interview
with America’s
CNN, Mr Blair had presented himself as the innocent victim of bad intelligence
who at least had made the world a safer place by toppling Saddam Hussein. No
need to apologise then for the consequences of his actions in 2003. Long before
the ex-Prime Minister adopted a new profile as prophet-in-chief at his
not-for-profit Faith Foundation (modelled on the not-so-transparent Clinton
Foundation), his messianic self-righteousness left little room for
acknowledging his own faults, but plenty of energy for addressing those of
others.

Symptomatic of Mr Blair’s peculiar mindset was his
willingness from the arrival of New Labour in Downing St. in 1997 to apologise for dark episodes in
Britain’s past, while refusing to take the blame for any bad consequences of
his own policies, least of all for the ever-expanding chaos in the Middle East,
Mr Blair was happy to glow with a perverse pride by apologising for the Irish
Potato Famine in 1846 and ended his term as prime minister expressing his shame
about the slave trade abolished in 1807. To be he even let slip his regrets for
his pre-PC spanking of his children, but only to draw attention to what a
paternal model he was now setting!

But this happy scapegoat for Britain’s past sins was remarkably
tight-lipped about his own responsibility for squandering British lives, not to
mention Iraqi ones, from 2003. Nor until now has ever admitted that his
policies have made people in Britain
less safe.

Tony Blair used to taint anyone who said his actions had played
into the hands of hate-preachers here and had helped fuse the bombs which hit London in July, 2005,
with the brush of apologists for terrorism. Yet in his cosy chat on CNN, when
the subject of the emergence of the most brutal terrorist threat yet in
post-Saddam Iraq came up, he let slip, “Of course,
you-you can't say that those of us who removed Saddam in 2003 bear no
responsibility for the situation in 2015.”

That double-negative is the
nearest TB has ever got to admitting that he helped to fuel the flames now
licking Britain’s
doorstep. What is now clear [from the Mail on Sunday’s reporting] is that IS
is not only an immediate threat to millions of people in Iraq and Syria,
but the jihadi terrorists are burrowing away inside Britain. Funds are being raised here
by a spooky convert to Islam for IS’s global ambitions but also to provide
support to potential killers being recruited here and now to go out on our
streets and repeat the butchery of Corporal Lee Rigby on a wider scale. The
terrifying blowback from Tony Blair’s blithe commitment to President Bush to go
into Iraq
whatever the circumstances is gathering pace. Saying sorry is hardly going to
stop that momentum.

Maybe we can sympathise a bit with Blair’s unwillingness to
come clean. All of us confront the dilemma from time to time that conscience
prods us that we have behaved shabbily but our self-esteem tries to silence it
by whispering, “I couldn’t have done that, not me”! As Prime Minister of “Cool Britannia” Tony
Blair embodied the “Me Generation”. If only we knew how sincere he was, nobody
would doubt his motives. A mental block stopped him following his spin doctor,
Alistair Campbell’s advice always to kill a bad story by fessing up straight
away and urging people to move on. Instead Blair’s pride insists, “Don’t hold
me responsible. I was only Prime Minister.” He denies that he can be faulted
for believing – if he did – faulty intelligence as though the tenant of Downing St. just
swallows what is served up by his staff. (Since Blair was clearly dependent in
his interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on the flow of scripted responses through
an ear-pierce pioneered by Ronald Reagan and perfected by Barack Obama, maybe
he was never more than a mouthpiece.)

Although “Better late than never” will be the kindest
response that Tony Blair will get from the widows and orphans created by his
feckless policy in the Middle East, in reality this was not an apology but a
pre-emptive strike to dull the impact of criticisms likely to be contained in
the Chilcot Report, which may even appear within months after years of careful
drafting to meet Blair’s replies to his critics. What formed the Semtex in his
interview was his admission that the spreading cancer of Middle Eastern
terrorism is a result of his policies.

Even with Blair in perma-tanned retirement, his poisonous legacy still threatens us here
at home and abroad because too many policy-makers can’t shake themselves free
from him as their role-model for success in modern Britain. Until Jeremy Corbyn was
elected Labour leader there was no official opposition to Blair’s approach to
foreign policy which was embraced by
most Labour MPs as well as the majority of Tories.

For the future, even a fulsome Blair apology for past errors
will be a dead-letter if the government still clings to the Blairite approach
to foreign problems. David Cameron and his peers belong to that long Blairite
generation that knew only peace and prosperity as they grew up in the security
of the Cold War. Tony Blair casually launched Britain into a succession of hot
wars. Kosovo worked out bloodlessly for us in 1999, but it seduced Mr Blair
into thinking any casualties would always be Theirs not Ours.

Sadly, despite the our forces’ heavy toll in both Iraq and
Afghanistan, where nothing has been achieved worth the blood of a British
grenadier, Tony Blair’s deadly political legacy to his successors in power
today is a knee-jerk reliance on military force to grab today’s headlines even
if no planning for tomorrow’s consequences has been made. It is also that for
all the talk about terrorism, no responsibility is taken for policies which
help to promote it.

So let’s not heap all the blame for Iraq and
terrorism on Blair. Too many are still anxious to share the guilt - or claim the credit for another misguided war after one more poorly-planned intervention.

Just as he demonised Saddam Hussein as the root-and-branch
of all Iraq’s problems and argued that deposing him would transform the country
for good, so critics of Tony Blair tend to blame him as the sole villain in the
sorry tale of our futile involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, too. But remember
how the self-proclaimed “heir to Blair”, David Cameron casually sent the RAF to
bomb Libya in 2011 without a
thought for the morrow, despite the
experience of Iraq
since 2003. Let’s face it, the same mindset which saw a majority of MPs vote
for war in Iraq in 2003, now
sits in a majority in Westminster
today.

Until now Tony Blair has refused to apologise for anything
which went wrong in Iraq, but it is much worse that the House of Commons is
still teeming with MPs, on both sides, who have learned nothing from it. Do
those who want to bomb Syria
as a panacea for the problems caused by invading Iraq really know what will come
next?

The Blairites blithely insist that there was no alternative
then or now to their failure to consider what might go wrong and that anyone
who doubts that theirs was the only choice are friends of dictators like Saddam,
Gaddafi or Assad. Complacent Blairites never have to face the brutal reality
that life in the terrifying uncertainty of civil war is far worse than under a
dictatorship. Instead in the USA
as well as the UK, promotion
and prosperity are the wages of waging dead-end wars in the Middle
East.

The Blairite default position of bomb now and improvise if
things go wrong compares badly with how past leaders dealt with their policies
going pear-shaped. In 1997, many
commentators compared the photogenic Blair with his smart wife and young
children with Jack Kennedy entering the White House in 1961. But no-one can
imagine Blair responding to the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs with President
Kennedy’s frank admission, “Not only were our facts in error, but our policy
was wrong because the premises on which it was built were wrong.” Over Iraq, Blair
blames his subordinates for briefing him wrong: it wasn’t his job to get the
facts right, merely to spout spurious justifications on the basis of “the
intelligence crossing my desk.”

Like many neo-conservatives, Tony Blair like to posture as a
Churchillian figure who would never had truck with appeasement. Could there be
a sharper contrast than that between “Bombs Away Blair” and Neville
Chamberlain? Chamberlain’s appeasement is universally condemned today as the
folly it was, but, however flawed his foreign policy, unlike Blair Chamberlain
prepared for the worst even while dealing with Hitler. His fiercest critic,
Winston Churchill, noted that Chamberlain had drafted detailed plans to
mobilise Britain’s
economy for war, to prepare evacuation and rationing if – when - Hitler cheated
him. Without Chamberlain, there would have been war anyway, but Britain would have been even worse prepared for it
than was the case. Blair sat on his sofa in 10 Downing St. preening himself as the
new Churchill but failed to dictate a memo about what to do after his
anticipated triumph brought British troops back to the Euphrates.
(Of course, as briefers of Blair admitted, the Prime Minister clearly did not
know that British troops had been in Iraq
after the First World War until well into his war preparations, but then in
2001 he knew not that he was embarking on Britain’s Fourth Afghan War!)

Marching into Iraq
in 2003, or parachuting into Helmand three
years later, Blair operated on the principle that our forces would be welcomed.
There would be no need to fire a shot. Muslim tribes would settle down to adopt
a New Labour lifestyle overnight.

Past prime ministers were voracious readers of history.
Think of Churchill living a soldier’s life on the North-West Frontier and
reading by candlelight as much as he could in that university of life. That
kind of self-education taught past prime ministers how to avoid old mistakes –
even if they couldn’t avoid new ones. Both Tony Blair and David Cameron give
the strong impression that their lives were shaped by a Harry Potter version of
Britain.
Instead of being places of learning and inquiry, Oxford,
like Eton and Fettes, was just a stepping
stone on that effortless path to the top. Reality, past or present, plays little part in
their showman’s version of history. Both have claimed that in 1940 the USA was
fighting on our side during the Battle of Britain! A Disney version of history
clutters their minds with sound-bites of battles fought on the back-lot at Hollywood. People used to
sneer at the Prince Regent’s account of how
he led cavalry charges at Waterloo,
but Blairite virtual reality – with only the squaddies and towel-heads shedding
actual blood – is loyally repeated by BBC and SKY News.

Since their careers were facilitated with magical ease as
they rose to the top, perhaps Blair and Cameron should be forgiven for assuming
that their touch, like that of medieval monarchs, could heal the sick and transform
every problem they handle. Their good intentions are so self-evident that any
doubt is malign or mischievous. Words of warning are insults.

How could anyone have thought that the only alternative to
the dictatorships of Saddam or Gaddafi would be democracy? Shouldn’t chaos have
been on their radars?

Even if chaos had been avoided why should anyone have
expected thanks from Iraqis or Afghans for our intervention. Stendhal, who was a
soldier in France’s
revolutionary armies, noted with a novelist’s eye how bitterly humiliating
Italians found being liberated by foreigners.

Think of General de Gaulle’s taunting of the British and
Americans after the war. He knew that France’s
liberation in 1944 was due to the “Anglo-Saxons”, so he spent the next
twenty-five years trying to expunge that shameful dependency by twisting our
tails whenever he could just to prove France was truly independent – even
of its liberators.

Many Iraqis or Libyans had to die so a Blair or a Cameron
could pose briefly before a carefully selected adoring audience of locals singing
exactly the same songs of praise with which they had adored yesterday’s fallen dictators.
Little wonder that resentment boiled up among the rest of the population.

Should we be surprised that after Blair’s admission that he
had helped spark the rise of the murderous IS cult tearing Iraq apart that so many Iraqis today are making
eyes at Russia
that did nothing to topple Saddam? After all, the Russians also didn’t create
the security vacuum into which fanatics like IS stepped. With local rulers
either blaming us for spawning IS or actually funding and arming the radical
jihadis, the situation is running out of control for us in the West.

An apology from Tony Blair won’t unmake the mistakes since
2003. Worse still it may act as an alibi for carrying on with the same policies
only without him at the helm of state. As the sinister hand of IS spreads into
suburban Britain from the anarchy spawned by intervention in Iraq, parliament
needs to think more about defending us at home rather than hoping that a
re-play intervention abroad will produce a better result.

Maybe it no longer matters if Tony Blair is never going to
learn from the terrible human costs of wars blithely entered into. But David
Cameron has paid no political price for helping to plunge Libya into
chaos. Luckily, so far no British dead there. But what about sending our Tornadoes
tearing away into Syria?
Has a House of Commons which forgets that it voted to invade Iraq in 2003 and which had no problems imploding Libya, really escaped from the
shadow of Tony Blair? It is not only the PM of the day who should examine his
conscience and try to learn lessons. A lot of MPs need to think before they
vote to bomb. Even a good cause needs more than a knee-jerk reaction. From Afghanistan in 2001 via Iraq and Libya, our rulers have failed to
ask what comes next – and then feign innocent surprise when it’s chaos.

One truth Tony Blair likes
to repeat is how interconnected the world had become and he insists
there is no escape from globalism. But
by creating conditions for the log-rolling growth of global jihadi terrorism,
his legacy has left us at home and the world at large in a daily more dangerous
place.

Sunday, 19 July 2015

Opening Royal
Archives from 1930s and 1940s Won't Damage the Queen's Reputation.

By Mark Almond

“Long to reign over us” sings the national anthem. And its prayers have been
answered. Queen Elizabeth II has reigned successfully over this country since
1952 with every indication of many more years to come.

But longevity has its price.

Skeletons can fall out of long-forgotten family cupboards. Yet the irony of the
current fuss about the 1933 holiday video showing the royals larking around
doing fascist salutes seems to me that its 20 seconds encapsulate how lucky we
are to have our current royal family.

What makes the video controversial is the behaviour of the future Edward VIII
not his niece. Our Queen and her parents had no truck with the Nazis but her
uncle did.

The man who became merely Duke of Windsor in December, 1936, after a brief
reign was the black sheep of the royal family. It was his paying court to
Hitler in 1937 and keeping in contact with pro-Nazi German royals even after
the outbreak of war which casts a shadow over his reputation.

Let’s be fair to Edward VIII. The mass murder of the Holocaust was in the
future then. The mass killing on people’s minds was the blood-drenched trenches
of World War One. The future Edward VIII was painfully aware of the human cost
of that war.

Responding to the plight of unemployed ex-servicemen during the Great
Depression, the then Prince of Wales shocked British politicians by
declaring, “Something must be done.” He wanted to rescue the ragged veterans
from the dole queue. The problem was that the most seductive answer to mass unemployment
was offered by Adolf Hitler.

The Nazi leader knew how to play up to foreign leaders who had seen the horror
of war, 1914-18. Wasn’t he a frontline veteran, too? Hitler’s success in
conquering mass unemployment owed a lot to his massive rearmament. Naïve souls
like the ex-Edward VIII were gulled into thinking he wanted peace and
prosperity not war and plunder.

The ex-King had several close German relatives who had been toppled from their
thrones in 1918 when Germany
became a republic. They shared is resentment against democratic politicians and
hoped Hitler would reinstate them. But Hitler used ex-royals like Philip of
Hesse and the Duke of Coburg to butter up their English cousin.

In 1937, now an ex-king himself, Edward visited Hitler at Berchtesgaden. He had
been taken on a tour of the new Germany’s
developments. He saw and travelled on the autobahn
network and apparently even met some of the forced labour being reformed in
concentration camps. The Duke of Windsor wasn’t alone in taking the political
equivalent of a guided tour. Another ex-insider now in the political
wilderness, Lloyd George, had a similar experience and uttered the same sort of
compliments on the Nazis’ ability to put people back to work. But most of
all, men like the Duke of Windsor and Lloyd George came away convinced that the
Hitler, who knew trench warfare first hand, was as anxious to avoid a re-run of
the horrors of war as they were. Probably each hoped that Britain would recognise that they still had
great services to offer, particularly when compared with the pedestrian
establishment in power in London
by then.

Effectively exiled from Britain, the
Duke of Windsor was prey to the world of snobs and spivs hoping to cash in on
his celebrity and loneliness, but he was also the target of German agents of
influence like Hesse anxious to use him as a potential ally inside Britain as
appeasement gave way to a resolve to defy Hitler by early 1939. Even after the
war broke out, Edward met Hesse in Lisbon
in 1940. He was there to sound out the ex-King on what would happen if Britain
surrendered.

This was foolish behaviour even if Hesse
was a close relative. Even though there is no evidence Edward committed
treason, doubts about what he might have let slip to his German cousins lingered
as the Allies brought the war to a victorious close. He was known to have
expressed strongly anti-Communist views, let slip a few anti-Jewish slurs and
so on after his abdication. In 1945 the royal family sent a trusted courtier to
Germany to retrieve
correspondence from the Hesse family archive.
Ironically, it was the Soviet spy, Anthony Blunt, who was a wartime MI5
officer, who was sent on this delicate mission.

The royal household wanted to protect the secrets of the ex-King as fiercely as
the Crown Jewels. But whatever Blunt found was no secret from the Kremlin
during the Cold War. If there was dynamite in the Hesse
papers, surely Blunt’s Soviet masters would have ignited it in an anti-Western
propaganda campaign at the height of the Cold War.

In any case, the ex-king’s naïve and irresponsible
behaviour was in stark contrast with his brother’s. Whatever the self-centred
faults of the Duke of Windsor, George VI and the Queen Mother rose to the
challenge of the Blitz magnificently. By rallying the nation they completed the
process of creating a genuinely British royal family. The German dynasty which
inherited Britain
in 1714 finally became thoroughly British. Unlike previous queens, the wife of
the future George VI, Elizabeth
Bowes-Lyons, wasn’t a foreign princess. The future Queen Mother was apparently
more closely related to Macbeth than any German princeling! Marrying subjects
for the royal family is now so normal that it would be a surprise if a future
King or Queen married “out”.

It was Queen Victoria’s
marriage to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha which had given the royal family
an awkward long-winded German surname. In fact, Albert himself was a
model liberal reformer who used his influence behind the scenes, for instance,
to oppose any blimpish support by Whitehall
for the Confederacy during the American Civil War. But with the outbreak of war
against cousin Kaiser’s Germany
in 1914 put George V on the spot. The adoption of Windsor
as the official name of the dynasty in 1917 was part of distancing itself from
the legacy of Queen Victoria’s
litter of foreign reigning and now deposed grandchildren – and certainly from
the ill-omened and executed cousin Nicky of Russia, murdered along with his
wife Alexandra of Hesse and their children by Lenin’s Communists.

It was George V’s very wooden public persona which made
him such a suitable figurehead for a modern democracy with the Labour Party
increasingly challenging for power. He pioneered many of the public
relations activities which royals still engage in. Their frequent lack of
natural vim when meeting the public ironically fits their role very well: they
are royal celebrities but by birth rather than as natural entertainers or
skilled sportsmen. Fitting in to their role rather than dominating it requires
a dedicated ordinariness in modern democracy. Edward VIII was not willing to
subject himself to the demands of the new royal role.

It was one of Winston Churchill’s glaring inconsistencies
in the 1930s that he chose to champion keeping Edward VIII on the throne in
December, 1936, even though the King was a potential political liability in the
looming atmosphere of political crisis abroad. Churchill’s decried political
appeasers of Hitler but romanticised the royal one. Churchill’s anachronistic
view that hereditary right trumped other considerations when it came to who was
Britain’s head of state ignored the role of his great ancestor, the founder of
the Churchill dynasty, in pushing James II out because he was politically and
religiously unacceptable in 1688 and helping the Hanoverians in in 1714 because
the Stuarts with a better claim to the throne by birth couldn’t satisfy the
political elite here that they would stick to the newly-entrenched system of
Parliamentary government.

Nothing of those sort of machinations is likely to be
revealed by any papers or videos from the 1930s. Opening the archives hardly
seems likely to damage their standing with the public. Elizabeth II’s long life
is a living thread uniting the nation’s history and it has been lived in the
limelight. Remember even before her uncle abdicated as King Edward VIII in
1936, she was his heir because the future Duke of Windsor had no children – and
never did.

In many ways it was the disappearance of Edward VIII into a sad twilight which
paved the way for making the monarchy a truly British institution. From wartime
in the 1940s through the end of empire and the birth of the welfare state, the
royal family’s standing has prospered despite their courtiers’ obsession with
keeping the people at arms’ length.

In recent years even tragedy in the royal family has been treated with more
openness. BuckinghamPalace learned from the
death of Princess Diana and quickly reached out to the British people. The
marriage of William and Katherine and the births of their children have
strengthened its popularity. Traditionalists cluck about taking the brand
down-market, but so far it has worked and dampened the fears for the monarchy’s
future which were so evident in the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death.

Unlike fly-by-night presidents, the Queen’s long life means that she straddles
history and the present. The archives of her personal story are inextricably
bound up with national history. Maybe there are fears of the monarch getting
drawn into party politics. The recent fuss about Prince Charles’s letters to
ministers over issues of his particular concern to him which was brought into
the public domain by the Freedom of Information Act requiring their publication
even though they were written to the last Labour government. Such recent
interventions were inherently controversial and, in my view salutary, because
the monarch should be cautious about treading into divisive areas where
inherently significant groups of British people will disagree.

But opening up aspects of the Queen’s
early years is not going to damage public respect for the monarchy now. It
is admittedly awkward to mix the personal and the public, but a hereditary
royal family embodies that uncomfortable chemistry. In the end the public role
of the monarch takes priority as the Queen herself has suggested by making
clear that her coronation oath was a lifelong commitment.

The grainy cine film from summer, 1933, comes from very
early in that long life of service. It was a time of looming crisis which could
have shattered British society and toppled more than the monarchy. Far from
discrediting our Queen, the video from 1933 should reminds us of how many
challenges this country has overcome over the last eight decades under the
Windsors.

Having performed her role as a constitutional monarch impeccably for
longer than most can remember, opening the archives can only reinforce the
Queen’s standing. What the horse-play in summer 1933 reveals is how lucky Britain was in those years of crisis that
Elizabeth II’s parents, and not her uncle, were in BuckinghamPalace
during the Blitz.

This is an edited version of an article by CRIOx Director,
Mark Almond, from The Sun on Sunday (19th
July, 2015).

Sunday, 21 June 2015

With all eyes on Athens watching to see if Greece’s left-wing government
blinks tomorrow in its stand-off with the EU over its debt mountain, let’s not
lose sight of the bigger political picture.

Greece’s cash
crisis is a moment of opportunity for Vladimir Putin’s Russia. As Athens’
EU partners weary of subsidising Greece,
energy-rich Russia is eyeing
the Balkans as a strategic route to weakening the links between Europe
and Russia.
Putin is offering the region the carrot of a lucrative gas pipeline and other
incentives to draw countries like Greece
and Turkey
away from the West.

Manoeuvring for
position for any “Grexit” from the Euro is part Russia’s
deepening rift with the West over everything from Ukraine
to the Middle East. Greece
has become one of the exposed nerves in the New Cold War between Washington and Moscow.
Remember Greece’s
civil war in 1947 sparked the old Cold War as
President Truman took one side and Stalin the other. Today, Greece is at
the heart of renewed East-West rivalry as well as the Eurocrisis.

On Friday,the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, dropped a
meeting with the EU’s current President, Poland’s
Donald Tusk, to
travel to Russia’s old
imperial capital, St. Petersburg, to
meet President Putin instead.

There, in a highly symbolic
tribute, Tsipras laid a wreath at the statue of Kapodistrias, the ethnic Greek
who acted as Imperial Russia’s foreign minister and did much of the diplomatic spadework which would eventually bring about a
pan-European intervention on the side of the Greeks during their war for
independence after 1821. Another ethnic Greek, Ypsilantis, an officer in the Imperial Russian army
actually ignited Greece’s War
for Independence
in 1821. He was the forerunner of today’s Russian “volunteers” in
the Donbas. Tsipras was paying homage to the
idea that Russia not the
West has been Greece’s
true patron. Putin himself emphasised Russia’s deep ties of culture and religion with
neighbours like Ukraine and
Balkan countries like Greece.

Of course, Britain
has been at odds with Russian imperial ambitions in the region before.The
Crimean War was fought to stop them. In 1878, jingoism got its first outing
when London’s
music halls echoed to the sentiment “We don’t want to fight but by jingo if we do”
before listing what the Russians wouldn’t be allowed to grab in the Balkans.
But the current standoff between Moscow-backed rebels in the south-east of Ukraine and the US-supported government in Kiev is why relations
between East and West are so tense now.

Ukraine seems to be
a reversion to the kind of Cold War proxy conflict between the Kremlin and the
West which was normal in the decades before 1989. Then each superpower engaged
in a hardly covert struggle for influence backing their local allies from Africa via Vietnam
to Afghanistan,
and trying to undermine the other side’s allies.

But let’s not be seduced too easily by old Cold War stereotypes.
Of course, Vladimir Putin’s much
publicised early career in the KGB has been to give him a sinister glamour, at
home as well as abroad, but he long abandoned any commitment to Communism.

The old Cold War was a clear rivalry between Communism and
Capitalism. Capitalism won hands down – not least in Russia itself. Since the collapse
of the Soviet Union, Putin and his close
circle of ex-KGB ministers, advisers and cronies have abandoned any allegiance
to Marxist ideas. Their Russia
is not a socialist state any more. If anything post-Communist Russia has had
a more cut-throat capitalist economy than anything seen in the West since well before the First
World War.

Putin is often misquoted - or at least incompletely quoted – as
promoting nostalgia for the USSR and a desire to restore it when he said
that Russian who did not regret the break up of the state and society into
which they had been born lacked a heart, but he added – something usually
overlooked - that anyone who wanted to recreate the Soviet

Union lacked a
brain. His preferred historical models are to be found among people and policies
before the Bolshevik Revolution.

It is to pre-1914
Imperial Russia and its culture and traditions that Putin most often
looks for symbols to bolster his politics today. So he has declared the last
tsar's reforming prime minister, Stolypin, his political hero, not Stalin. Of
course, he savoured the
anniversary of the Red Army’s victory over Hitler in 1945, still the biggest
badge of pride for Russians from their tarnished Communist past, but he by
the Soviet Communists. Strikingly, even his defence minister, a Russian
Buddhist by has committed himself to the country’s Orthodox Christian heritage
so despised origin, nonetheless made the sign of
the cross in the Orthodox way on the spot where the renegade seminarian,
Stalin, had celebrated Hitler's defeat.

Imperial Russia’s Nicholas I prefigured Putin’s hostility
to “People Power” revolutions, seeing the upheavals of his day – Poland in 1831 or Central Europe in 1848 – as
the result of liberal machinations promoted from Paris
and London as Putin sees Washington's
hand behind the crisis in Ukraine. Nicholas I made an exception in his support
for Orthodox Christians in Greece
rebelling against the Muslim Sultan.

For many Greeks
and Russians being an Orthodox Christian is essential to their national identity.
Putin’s emphasis on traditional values puts him at odds with the West,
where tolerance and individual rights are now sacrosanct. Putin’s
government has put a lot of effort into rallying cultural
conservatives in the West to Russia’s
side as the bastion of family values.
Cynical propaganda it may be but it is very different Soviet Communism’s
anti-Christian diatribes.

Putin emphasises Russia’s the thousand-year old ties with the
Greek Orthodox Church which brought Christianity first to Ukraine then Russia itself. In 1947, Greek
Christians were anti-Communist and so anti-Moscow. Not any more.

As in the early
nineteenth century, Graeco-Russian solidarity is based on religion which was
very different from British sympathy for the Greeks then which was a liberal
cause.

Britain’s most
famous contribution to Greek independence was Lord Byron’s quixotic sacrifice
of his own life fighting to revive the glories of ancient pagan Athens. Byron was no
friend of Christianity, Orthodox or Anglican. Imperial Russia backed the Orthodox Christians who
actually lived in modern Greece.
Today Putin plays up his role as a born-again Orthodox Christian to Greeks, though let’s remember George
Bush liked that in him too. (Another Western born-again Christian, Tony Blair
made the pilgrimage to Putin in St. Petersburg
on the same day as Tsipras but whether as acolyte or to spy out
any weaknesses in the Russian government for his rival patrons in Kiev has yet to be revealed.)

But Putin backs up appeals to cultural solidarity with incentives
in hard cash.

If Putin dreams of a revived Orthodox Christian alliance
reaching deep into Europe’s backyard in the Balkans, this is because he
calculates that Greece is where
Moscow could split
the EU and NATO.

Russia’s vast
energy resources are the tool to prize apart NATO states from America. Already,
Russia has signed an
agreement to build a gas pipeline to Turkey. On Friday, Tsipras added Greece’s signature to the project.
Both Turkey and Greece are attracted by a gas pipeline supplying
them with energy at a favourable price and giving them a
share in the profits of transporting it further West, ultimately to energy-hungry
Italy, the big prize at the
heart of the West from Russia's
point of view. No-one needs reminding that Greece could do with a few billion
euros in transit fees, whether there is a Grexit or
not.

Tsipras may calculate that he can use the Russian bogey to
frighten Brussels into continuing the
bail-out, but if the Germans refuse to pay up, Russia
can at least tide Athens
over for a while it sorts out an orderly return to the drachma.

Putin has not,
however, got limitless resources to play with. Oil and gas prices are well below
where the Kremlin needs them to have the tens of billions to throw around which
would really buy friends and influence throughout the Balkans if the West plays
tough.

Brussels and Washington see the
Russian-sponsored pipeline as a Trojan Horse. They have already twisted Bulgaria’s arm
not to participate in Putin’s
project. Orthodox Bulgaria had had the reputation as the most pro-Russian
country in the region so its backing away from
Putin’s embrace shows the limits of cultural traditions in the Balkans.
In neighbouring Macedonia,
street protests against the government where only quietened when the prime
minister said his country would not join Russia's
pipeline project without the consent of Brussels.

But Greece has had a long history since 1945 as the
most truculent member of both NATO and then the EU, so it could prove a tough
nut for Western pressure to crack. Greece's
obstinate refusal to acknowledge "Macedonia"
as its neighbour's name and therefore the country's candidacy to either
the EU or NATO is just one symptom of Athens'
ability to block its allies when it chooses to.

Today’s Russia
does not have the resources of the West but nor is it the basket-case which
the Soviet Union had become by the 1980s.
Putin is playing on the economic realities which make the New Cold War so
different from the past. During the Cold War alliance with Washington was the high road to prosperity for Western Europe. After 1948, America’s
Marshall Plan helped lift post-war Europe out
of misery. Communism’s inability to match the West’s economic boom from the
1950s sealed its unpopularity in Eastern Europe
and Soviet Russia itself.

But today the White House is
asking its European allies to make economic sacrifices to counter the Kremlin.

For four decades,
Western Europe had a free-ride on Washington’s
coat-tails. Now sanctions on Russia hit European businesses
hard. Particularly in rural Greece
and the ex-Communist states of the new
EU members, losing agricultural sales to Russia has bee a body-blow.
But big German and Italian manufacturers have taken heavy hits too.

Putin plays up the argument that President Obama is setting the
anti-Russian sanctions policy but the price is paid by austerity-hit Europeans.
Gnawing away at European support for sanctions on Russia
over Ukraine
are the losses of valuable exports to their vast eastern neighbour. Greece is least
able to afford such losses.

Putin is able to sit out the
sanctions because ordinary Russians blame the West rather than him for growing
hardship. That is a very different state of affairs than the cynical attitude
towards the Kremlin in the last years of Communism. He hopes to chip away
at EU solidarity. Let’s face it, there are a lot of divisions inside the EU and
not just over Russia.
Newly-elected governments here in Britain
and in Denmark
want to cut back the rights of migrant workers flooding west from Poland and the Baltic
States which see themselves as the frontline of the New Cold
War. In Warsaw, plans in Londonto change migrants’ rights to benefits are seen as a
stab in the back of NATO’s eastern allies.

Greeks demand solidarity from
NATO allies in cash. As that dries up, Greece could be the first domino to
fall. Turkey
could follow as its own political and economic crisis is pushing President Erdogan eastwards.

Nothing in history is every exactly a repetition of past patterns.
The New Cold War has different dynamics from the one before 1989, but, by jingo, it seems that traditional British
fears of Imperial Russia’s dream of dominating the region could have life
in them yet.

Mark Almond is
Director of the Crisis Research Institute, Oxford (CRIOx).